U.S. Built Its Own Secret Pakistani Spy Service

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U.S. Built Its Own Secret Pakistani Spy Service

Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency is schizophrenic about terrorism. It sponsors terrorist groups like the Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Toiba while also collaborating with the CIA to attack other terrorists. Quietly, the U.S. has a way to mitigate the tension: It sponsors an office inside the Pakistani spy apparatus and buys cooperation.

But now that office might be a casualty of the rising acrimony between Washington and Islamabad.

Deep within Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) lurks T Wing, one of the few offices inside the agency that the U.S. trusts, unearthed by our friend Eli Lake of Newsweek in a blockbuster story. Around the 10th anniversary of September 11, U.S. spies got a bead on the cellphone of al-Qaida's operations chief in Pakistan. Pakistan's Frontier Corps snatched him, and soon the terrorist was subjected to "intensive interrogation" at a "special detention center in Punjab province," Lake reports. T Wing runs that center.

If the name sounds odd, it's likely a play on S Wing – the branch of the ISI believed to sponsor terrorist groups and undermine pro-American factions nestled within the spy bureaucracy. Lake reports that T Wing emerged "from scratch" beginning in 2007. And it's not alone.

"America also has embraced and funded units connected to Pakistan's Interior Ministry," Lake writes, "particularly in the corruption-ridden megalopolis of Karachi, where the local police are not considered reliable counterterrorism partners."

Beyond that, the CIA has its own network of Pashtun spies who traverse the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, spotting strike targets for the drone war overhead.

Whatever the merits of that step, it could doom T Wing, which probably hasn't had an easy time maintaining itself inside ISI to begin with. (Just imagine the awkward break-room conversations.) That's one way to resolve Pakistan's terrorism schizophrenia.